Beviev Bla Tarr, le temps d'aprs : Les carts du cinma

BIa Tavv, Ie lenps d'apvs I Jacques Bancive: Les cavls du cinna I Jacques Bancive
Beviev I AIIevlo Toscano
FiIn QuavlevI, VoI. 65, No. 3 |Spving 2012), pp. 83-85
FuIIisIed I University of California Press
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FI L M QUARTERLY 83
but also more recognizable, watchable, and marketable, than
Bordwell in his formalism and Kovcs [in] his historicalism
would allow (3940).
Indeed, a key aim of the volume is to expand current
understandings of global art cinema as a multifaceted
phenomenon. While Betz makes the case for the importance
of a parametric tradition as a subset of international style,
David Andrews argues for moving Towards an Inclusive,
Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema. Instead of formal
aspects or exhibition contexts, he favors a multigeneric
approach, where the term art cinema retains the aura
of exclusiveness and relative distinction but, nevertheless,
expands to include the art zone of any genre, including
Tom Bokas 1993 art porn lm Anthonys Desire (69). The
essay is short on specic examples, but art horror would
presumably include lms such as Tomas Alfredsons Let the
Right One In (2008).
Andrewss essay raises the question of whether critics
can cast the net of global art cinema too widely, rendering
it too diffuse to be meaningful. Adam Lowensteins essay
Interactive Art Cinema focuses on the classic BuuelDali
short Un Chien Andalou (1929) and David Cronenbergs
science-ction eXistenZ (1999) and interestingly explores
the relationship between old and new media, namely
Surrealist cinema and videogaming. However, although
there are brief references to Bordwell and Thomas Elsaesser,
the links in his argument to other art lms are rather sparse.
Other essays more directly suggest that one can rethink
traditional conceptions of the category. In part 2 (The
Art Cinema Image), for example, Brian Price interrelates
art cinema and museum installations, while Jihoon Kim
perspicaciously reads the cinematic video installations of
Apichatpong Weerasethakul in relation to the Thai directors
feature-length art lms.
Some of the strongest pieces in part 3 (Art Cinema
Histories) and part 4 (Geopolitical Intersections)
foreground questions of genre and narrative within larger
contexts of production, exhibition, and promotion. Azadeh
Farahmand provides a fascinating exploration of Iranian New
Wave cinema, noting that festival exposure may paradoxically
limit a lmmakers ability to deviate from models with
previous international success. Examining a similar dynamic
in the context of international co-production, Randall Halles
Offering Tales They Want to Hear raises concerns that
transnational European funding arrangements may risk
shaping narratives congruent with a pernicious European
transnationalism or neo-Orientalism. He nds evidence of
this inuence in the transcultural approach of movies such
as House of the Spirits (1993), where the actors often do not
match the ethnic backgrounds of the characters and achieve
a universality from their apparent status as Europeans (306).
At the same time, the essentializing national or cultural
types of lms with a quasi-transnational situation, such as
The Spanish Apartment (2001) are equally problematic. Halle
also points to the potential for neo-Orientalism in the quasi-
national approach of lms such as Paradise Now (2005),
which tends to mask the conditions of co-production by
foregrounding a nationally homogenous setting (30709).
Offering a plethora of approaches on an undertheorized
topic, Global Art Cinema productively shows directions
for future critical inquiry. The volume moves through
auteur-based approaches toward considerations of a larger
theoretical landscape that global art cinema can sustain,
including questions of affect, sexuality, politics, media forms,
postcolonialism, and the ambiguous space that global art
cinema holds in relation to both location and genre.
ALBERTO TOSCANO
Bla Tarr, le temps daprs
by Jacques Rancire
Les carts du cinma
by Jacques Rancire
From major works such as Gilles Deleuzes Cinema 1 and
2 (University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 1989) and Stanley
Cavells The Pursuit of Happiness (Harvard University
Press, 1984), to Slavoj ieks psychoanalytic diagnoses of
Hollywood, philosophy has traded its ancestral objections
to popular entertainment for an eager embrace of the mov-
ing image. Jacques Rancires Les carts du cinma (loosely
translatable as Cinemas Gaps), his second collection of
essays on cinema following Film Fables (Berg, 2006), begins
on an autobiographical note. This prominent French radical
thinker, known especially for his interweaving of emanci-
patory politics and aesthetics in books ranging from The
Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford University Press, 1991) to
Mute Speech (Columbia University Press, 2011), recounts
the formative experience of cinephilia he shared with a
whole generation of French critics, militants, and lmmak-
ers growing up in the 1950s and 60s.
KEVIN CRYDERMAN teaches lm studies at Emory University.
BOOK DATA Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories
and Histories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.
408 pages.
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84 SPRI NG 2012
Cinephilia is in principle a democratic, egalitarian taste;
it breaks with the hierarchical tendencies of aesthetics ever
since Platoinvolving in particular a suspicion of arts audi-
enceby nding truth and beauty in mass entertainment.
But rejecting elitism does not mean that anything goes.
Rancires account also emphasizes cinemas capacity to
stimulate political reection. His conicted response to the
spiritual denouement of Rossellinis Europa 51 (1952) and
aversion to Eisensteins The General Line (1929) are recalled
as challenges to his Marxist communism. These encounters,
then, are examples of the titles gapstensions between
historical materialism and the materialism of the image,
between equality as a political aim and what Rancire under-
stands as the equality (or indifference) of images, between
the urgency of politics and the patience of art.
Those already familiar with Rancires writing will recog-
nize one of his characteristic gestures: to indicate rifts where
others postulate knowable order and cohesion. Hence his
insistence on notions like dissensus and disagreement (gap
is analogous) but also his aversion to theorylm theory
includedso long as it is understood as an effort to master and
oversee differences. Rancires spirited defence of the politics
of the amateur (14) is aimed at defending spectatorship from
specialists who want to police interpretation. His aesthetic
and political ideal, of which the gure of the cinephile or
amateur is the emblem, is to combine an intense practice of
discernment with the conviction that this is a practice open to
anyone, irrespective of any claim to expertise. This approach
is thus at odds with much academic writing about lm.
Rancire regards any attempt to purify cinema of its con-
tamination by the other arts (through decrying narrative, for
example), or to make it a mere illustration of philosophical
truths, as indulging nostalgia for outdated regimes of art,
and a conservatism with regard to the development of modes
of representation. As he writes: Cinema belongs to this aes-
thetic regime of art in which there no longer exists the old
criteria of representation that separated the ne arts from the
mechanical arts and put each of them in their place (13). It
lives through its entanglement with politics, literature, phi-
losophy, criticism, as well as its capacity to distinguish itself
from them. In the act of nding cinematic gapsbetween
visibility and invisibility, bodies and narrative, sound and
image, actor and characterRancire explores the play of
identity and difference, and presents the disruption of bound-
aries as a spur for creation.
Les carts is divided into three sections, which respec-
tively concern the gap between cinema and literature
(After Literature); cinema, the other arts and philosophy
(The Borders of Art); cinema and politics (The Politics of
Films). In keeping with his bias against attempted theoreti-
cal mastery and hard classications, Rancire provides subtle
and patient readings of lms ranging from Rossellinis Blaise
Pascal (1972) to Vincente Minnellis Meet Me in St Louis
(1944). His insights can be acute and illuminating, as when
he discusses how Godard turns the images of past lmmakers
into icons (45) but there is an overarching coherence too,
which discloses three main theses or convictions.
The rst is that cinema is not (as Bresson proposed)
an anti-theatrical art, as much as it is a post-literary one.
Literatures capacity to accord equal value to all objects, expe-
riences, and topics (however insignicant) is carried over into
cinemas overturning of traditional prejudices about what are
arts proper topics. Cinema gives aesthetic dignity to the most
disparate and least exalted forms of lifewhether lingering
on the gestures and speech of Cape Verdean migrants in
Costas Colossal Youth (2006) or turning with the besotted
dancers of Tarrs Stntang (1994).
Rancires comparative analyses are attentive and often
scintillating. He explores the creative incongruence between
Bressons Mouchette (1967) and Bernanoss Nouvelle Histoire
de Mouchette, StraubHuillets Dalla nube alla resistenza
(1979) and the source texts of Cesare Pavese; Hitchcocks
Vertigo (1958) and BoileauNarcejacs The Living and the
Dead (Dentre les morts); andin another new work, Bla
Tarr, le temps daprs, an impressively exhaustive essay, com-
missioned for a Centre Pompidou retrospectivebetween
the Hungarian directors lms and the novels of Lszl
Krasznahorkai. The discussions are remarkable, sometimes
revelatory. Refusing any common-sense t between the cin-
ematic and the literary, for example, Rancire explores how
Bressons supposedly pure language of images paradoxi-
cally erases the visual descriptions in Bernanoss novel, and
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FI L M QUARTERLY 85
how it generates a hyperfunctional narrative that progresses
much more implacably than the novels (59).
Similarly, Rancire indicates how Hitchcocks apparent
delity to the combination of thriller intrigue and psychopa-
thology of obsession in The Living and the Dead is undercut
by the introduction of out-of-joint temporality (the dou-
bling of anticipatory dream and denouement in the famous
bell-tower scene; the revelation of Madeleines identity via
ashback and voiceover before Scottie comes to know any-
thing of it). The resulting gap between cinematic and lmic
narrative that these time-slips create is for Rancire testament
to the fact that while words can go back on themselves and
plotlines be recast in the course of a novel, for cinema the
correction of appearances is always a risky exercise (33).
The second, related thesis is that while cinema is an
impure art, constantly incorporating other arts and dou-
bling as entertainment, it is also novel in speciable ways.
Investigating Rossellinis struggle with bringing philosophy
to the screen in the TV trilogy composed of Socrates (1971),
Blaise Pascal, and Cartesius (1974), Rancire details how the
customary relation between the moving image and abstract
thought (be it illustrating philosophical ideas or documenting
their historical context) is partly transcended by Rossellini. This
occurs when Rossellini explores lms specic capacity to give
sensory form to bodily experiencethough Rancire remains
unpersuaded that the depiction of the philosophers suffering
esh can escape these lms concessions to a pedagogic project
which he is notoriously suspicious of. In his essay on Minnelli,
Rancire riffs on the MGM lions-head logos incorporation of
Ars gratia artis. He admiringly divides Minnellis lms into
ones such as The Pirate (1948) that are driven by the joyful
depiction of performance (including dance, clowning, ballet),
and those where performance is blocked by the pressures of
social life, such as Some Came Running (1958). Minnellis
work is emblematic for Rancire of the belief that art for arts
sake and entertainment are the same thing, but, if one wants to
show that they are, one only obtains the caricature of identity,
which recreates the chasm between them (7980).
How not to turn a gap into a chasm is perhaps one way
of articulating the third thesis: that there is a politics of (or in)
lm which cannot (and should not) be reduced to the model
of avowedly political lm. It was The General Lines propa-
gandistic didacticism that repelled Rancire when he rst saw
the lm and he expresses reservation too about Vertovs com-
munist utopianism. Rancire detects a paradox in lms like
The Man with a Movie Camera (1929): Vertov both deposes
the eye for the sake of an impersonal, machinic movement,
and reinstates it as a central organizing gaze. Much more con-
genial to Rancires way of thinking is StraubHuillets Dalla
nube alla resistenza which he takes to be the epitome of a
post-Brechtian break with pedagogical Marxism that enables
a shift from the revelation of the mechanisms of domination
to the examination of the aporias of emancipation (113).
Whether in StraubHuillets lms, in which a dialecti-
cal vision of history is arrested for the sake of tragic words
and gestures of resistance, or in the stubborn dignity of
Tarrs and Costas characters, adrift in the baleful after-
life of an already fraudulent communism or the misery of
the capitalist margins, Rancires appreciative references
evoke the underlying hostility to any project that claims to
directly connect knowledge about injustice to a program
for political action. If such a link always involves a spuri-
ous and ineffective claim to mastery then by contrast with
it the aesthetic decision in Costas Colossal Youth or Tarrs
Damnation (1988) to linger on immiseration is for Rancire
a kind of virtue rather than a symptom of powerlessness or
disorientation; it actually has, he claims, greater emancipa-
tory potential than didacticism.
But in what ways is this post-Brechtian cinema a cinema
of emancipation? It can be noted in this regard that three of
the gures of lmic resistance noted by RancireBressons
Mouchette, the young girl in Tarrs Stntang, and Anju in
Mizoguchis Sansho the Bailiff (1954) are suicides, incarna-
tions of defeat. In Rancires refusal of cinema that seeks to
show the structures of domination and mobilize energies
against it (148), and his praise of lmmakers like Costa who
seek to make available to everyone the wealth of sensory
experience present in the humblest of lives (149), we can
see the temptation of closing the gap between cinema and
politics in another way than the one promoted by the likes of
Eisenstein or Vertov.
Whether detailing Tarrs signature panning shots or the
role of ames in Minnelli, Rancire is a passionate and acute
cinephile. But his account of the relationship between cin-
ema and politics is in the end unpersuasive. In order to resist
a cinema which treats political analysis or emancipation as its
aim, Rancire champions cinematic oeuvres which extract a
kind of relentless beauty from poverty and suffering. To speak
of this troubling beauty in terms of politicseven if only as
the plural politics of lmsmay be a sacrice the amateur
has made to the philosopher Rancire continues to be.
ALBERTO TOSCANO teaches sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and is an
editor of the journal Historical Materialism.
BOOK DATA Jacques Rancire, Bla Tarr, le temps daprs. Paris: Capricci, 2011. 7.95.
88 pages.
Jacques Rancire, Les carts du cinma. Paris: La Fabrique, 2011. 13.00. 158 pages.
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